A company can have the money to hire, a product that is growing and enough work to keep another 20 engineers busy, yet still find itself unable to build the team it needs. That is increasingly becoming the problem for companies scaling across Europe. The European Union had 10.45 million ICT specialists employed in 2025, representing 5% of total employment, but having millions of technology professionals does not mean that the right people are available for every vacancy. In 2023, 57.5% of EU enterprises that recruited or tried to recruit ICT specialists said they had difficulty filling those positions.
For a company hiring five developers, this can be frustrating. For a company trying to grow an engineering function from 20 people to 100, it can become a serious business problem. Product launches start depending on recruitment timelines, existing engineers carry vacancies for longer and managers spend increasing amounts of time interviewing instead of running the teams they already have.
This is where IT recruitment in Europe becomes less about filling individual vacancies and more about building a repeatable way of accessing talent across several markets.
The companies that scale successfully tend to stop asking where they can find one more developer and start looking at how their entire recruitment model needs to change.
7 Best IT Recruitment Europe Strategies
1. Stop Treating Europe as One Talent Market
There is a temptation to talk about “European tech talent” as though it were one large pool of developers. It isn’t.
The employment market in Germany behaves differently from Romania. Poland has a different talent structure from Portugal. The Nordic countries have different salary expectations from Central and Eastern Europe. Even within the same country, Bucharest will not necessarily give an employer the same recruitment conditions as Cluj-Napoca or Iași.
The data makes some of those differences particularly interesting. In 2025, Sweden had the highest proportion of ICT specialists as a share of total employment in the EU at 8.9%, followed by Luxembourg at 8.7% and Finland at 7.8%. Romania was at 2.7%.
That does not mean Sweden is automatically a better place to recruit developers than Romania. It means companies need to understand what they are actually looking for before choosing a market.
A business trying to build a large engineering operation may prioritise workforce depth. Another company may need a small number of senior specialists with experience in a particular technology. A third may be looking for a cost structure that allows it to scale without sacrificing technical capability.
The right country depends on the problem being solved.
2. Build a Talent Map Before You Open the Vacancy
Most recruitment processes begin with a job description.
For companies scaling technology teams, it can be more useful to begin with the market.
Before advertising a role, hiring teams should understand how many people with the required skills are likely to exist in their target locations, what companies currently employ them, how competitive salaries are and whether those professionals are actively moving between employers.
This changes the recruitment conversation considerably.
If a company wants 30 senior software engineers in a market where experienced engineers are already heavily employed, the problem is not that the recruiters need to search harder. The hiring strategy itself may need to change.
The company may need to expand into another location, adjust the experience requirement, offer greater flexibility or consider a broader European talent search.
That decision is much easier to make before the vacancy has been open for six weeks.
3. Hire Across Borders Before You Need To
International recruitment should not begin when the local talent pool has been exhausted.
By that point, the company has usually already lost time.
Scaling businesses benefit from developing access to several markets before recruitment becomes urgent. That might mean building relationships with recruiters in Romania, Poland, Czechia, Hungary or other European technology hubs while the internal team is still relatively small.
The advantage is not simply having more candidates.
It gives the company options.
If hiring becomes difficult in one market, recruitment can shift towards another without restarting the entire process from zero.
This is particularly relevant for technical positions where demand is high and experienced candidates have several employers competing for their attention.
4. Stop Writing Job Descriptions for the Person You Already Have in Mind
This is a surprisingly common problem when companies scale.
A manager has worked with a particular type of engineer before, so the new vacancy becomes a list of everything that person happened to know. Five years of one programming language, three years of a particular framework, a specific degree and experience with an increasingly long list of tools.
The company may believe it is protecting quality.
Instead, it may be shrinking the talent pool unnecessarily.
Research into skills-based hiring has found that employers are increasingly placing greater emphasis on practical skills for rapidly changing areas such as AI rather than relying exclusively on traditional qualifications.
For scaling companies, the better question is what the engineer actually needs to accomplish.
If the person needs to design distributed systems, maintain a cloud infrastructure or build machine-learning products, those outcomes should drive the search. The technology stack matters, but it should not become a substitute for understanding capability.
Also read: How Long Does It Take to Hire Top Talent in Romania?
5. Create Different Recruitment Models for Different Roles
Not every technology vacancy deserves the same recruitment process.
A company hiring 15 junior developers should not necessarily use the same approach as it would for a principal engineer. A hard-to-find cybersecurity specialist may require direct sourcing and a specialist recruiter, while a more common role could be filled through an internal talent team.
This sounds obvious, but scaling companies often create one recruitment process and apply it to everything.
That is where inefficiency starts.
High-volume roles need process and automation. Specialist roles need market knowledge and targeted sourcing. Senior leadership positions require relationship building and a much deeper understanding of the candidate’s career motivations.
The recruitment model should reflect the difficulty of the role rather than the convenience of the company’s existing process.
6. Measure Recruitment as a Business Function
Once a company is hiring across multiple countries, simply counting how many vacancies have been filled is not enough.
Leadership needs to know where recruitment is working and where it is creating friction.
Useful measures include time-to-hire, offer acceptance rate, source of hire, cost per hire, candidate drop-off and retention after joining. Looking at these figures by country and role can reveal problems that are invisible in an overall recruitment report.
For example, a company may discover that it fills software engineering positions quickly in Romania but struggles with senior cloud roles in Germany. That tells management something useful about where to allocate recruitment resources.
Recruitment data becomes much more valuable when it changes a decision.
7. Combine Internal Recruitment With Specialist Market Access
There is a point at which an internal recruitment team cannot reasonably know every European technology market in enough detail to scale quickly.
That does not mean the company needs to hand recruitment over completely.
A more practical model is often to keep ownership of the employer brand, hiring decisions and candidate experience internally while using specialist recruitment partners to extend access to particular talent markets.
This is especially useful when entering a new country or recruiting for technical positions that the internal team rarely handles.
The recruiter brings market knowledge and candidate access. The company retains control over the hiring decision.
That distinction matters because scaling recruitment is not simply about increasing the number of CVs reaching the hiring manager. It is about increasing access to the right people without creating another layer of administrative work.
Also read: Where Can You Find the Best Developers?
Final Thoughts
Europe already has a substantial technology workforce, and that workforce continues to grow. But the numbers also show why companies cannot assume that a large pool of ICT specialists automatically makes recruitment easy. More than half of EU enterprises that recruited or tried to recruit ICT specialists reported difficulties filling those positions in the latest Eurostat enterprise data.
The challenge becomes more complicated when a company moves from occasional hiring to continuous growth. At that stage, recruitment starts affecting product capacity, delivery schedules and the workload of existing employees.
That is why the strongest IT recruitment Europe strategies tend to have one thing in common: they are designed around the company’s growth plans rather than individual vacancies.
A business that expects to double its engineering workforce should know which European markets it intends to use, which roles will be hardest to fill, which skills can be developed internally and where external recruitment expertise will be necessary.
It should also accept that the answer may change as the company grows.
The market that works when you have 20 engineers may not be the market that works when you have 200.
For scaling companies, that flexibility may ultimately matter more than choosing a single “best” European recruitment market.
